


I miss doing nothing with you. (I miss not having to pretend to like your family.)

by failsafe



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Coping, F/M, Family, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Miscommunication
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-03
Updated: 2013-07-03
Packaged: 2017-12-17 13:31:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/868111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/failsafe/pseuds/failsafe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[Post-Endgame.] She said she needed distance, but she can't get any. Especially not when, sometimes, he's so much like...</p>
            </blockquote>





	I miss doing nothing with you. (I miss not having to pretend to like your family.)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [amaresu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amaresu/gifts).



> Post-Endgame canon compliant. Death tags not used because author is of the opinion that ceasing is not death even though from the characters' point of view in this fic it definitely is. Sharing author's opinion about ceasing is not required for consumption of this fic. The pairings mentioned are simply referenced in this fic, since you'll notice the characters involved don't match up to said pairs. The title is from [this asofterworld comic](http://asofterworld.com/index.php?id=963). I hope you enjoy!

She sees him in him sometimes, but mostly she doesn't.

The first time she met Bart, she attacked him. There hadn't been another choice.

At the time, it hadn't seemed like something she would come to regret more than she would regret not having done it. Now she isn't so sure. And now she has time to think about it.

Sometimes she sees Wally in him, but mostly she doesn't.

It's too quiet. They're too quiet. When they're together, alone and not on a mission, they're quiet. She wishes it didn't feel so wrong.

“Hey, Bart?” she asks, looking across at him at their rounded, small table in the Watchtower's modestly sized mess hall.

“Yeah—” he responds and he turns to face her, movements gliding and green eyes peering at her beneath a yellow cowl.

 _'… Gorgeous.' '...Babe.'_ her mind fills in, making her lose her appetite entirely with a sick stab of guilt. He does look like him. Worse, he sounds like him, too.

“—Tigress?” comes the rest of the easy, ever so slightly too respectful reply.

“Why are you here?” she asks, and the smile she puts on her face is warm and gentle and familiar and for a second she thinks it's genuine. Then it hurts like overextending a muscle, but she doesn't let it falter until Bart responds.

Green eyes widen at her and a long back straightens. Instinctively she lifts her hands, bared fingertips lifted in a sign of surrender and then lowering back down toward the table's surface, urging calm. She shakes hear head too, for good measure, and finally finds an excuse to drop the aching curve of her mouth.

“Not that I want you to leave,” she amends.

“Oh,” Bart says, obviously relieved, but then his brow tightens down over his too-familiar eyes. He forces himself to relax before he studies her gaze again. “... Is there somewhere else I'm supposed to be?” he asks in an eager rhythm. 

“No,” she almost coos at him before she remembers that he's not a baby. She wouldn't have appreciated being cooed at, at his age.

“Then why were you asking?” Bart asks, not hiding that he's lost. He finds a grin and flashes it at her. The family resemblance is mortifying. “We're partners!”

She nearly wants to recoil. It feels like the exaggerated kindness everyone gives her now. M'gann, who had once been the closest girl she'd ever had since her sister, is nearly insufferable. Now it's easier to remember why it had been _so_ easy with Zatanna that first Halloween. It had just been the circumstance that hadn't been so easy, and they'd gotten distracted. And now they've _both lost someone_ again. Two people this time, in a way. But really, less has changed about that than about M'gann, and she feels it acutely—impending loss masked in change. She hopes there's something she can do about it, but recent experience hasn't given her the strongest optimism. Looking at Bart, though, she realizes that he has no consciousness whatsoever of exaggerating his attempts to console her, persuade her, win her. He has used all of those up and Jaime Reyes, and now that they have apparently succeeded quite well, Bart Allen is a much quieter person. Still not quiet enough, but it's not in his blood to be.

“So we are,” she answers dryly. She glances pointedly over at where the new Robin sits with his girlfriend. She nods slightly, indicatively. “I just wondered if—“

“Oh, no!” Bart replies, though his volume is more comfortably restrained. It is his turn to lift still-gloved palms. “I'm _so_ not crashing that. I mean in the modern, now-sense. Not _crash_ as in—the point is, _no bueno—_ “ His mouth is still gaping at her when he stops talking, abruptly, noticing the little lift of her eyebrows and the strong, pointed smirk. His face colors. And that's familiar, too.

“ _That's_ what I was wondering.”

“... Oh. No. I mean. No.”

“Fair enough,” she sighs.

“... Hey,” Bart says, and it's so near to a whisper it alarms her and she leans in over the table as he leans over the table. They're holding one another's eyes, and it's so bright and intense that she feels her own face color a bit, and she wants to glance around and see if anyone is looking because she expects the familiar, stupid magnetism to kick in at any minute. Those eyes. But then she remembers and it's like ice all over her that that is never going to happen again and that it's just a memory, her burden of shame from things like this deepening and getting heavy somewhere in a specially dedicated reservoir that she has felt somewhere in her body. It's the place where all the pieces go where something else used to be. Only it keeps getting heavier and heavier, because no matter how hard she tries she can't get rid of what's aching there in the first place. Because, as it turns out, you can't get _distance_ from something that's inside you, that _deep_ in your blood.

She'd known that once. Before.

“Is there something I can do? You know. For you?” he asks, and she had almost forgotten they were talking. And he's so discreet that the anger doesn't come, and she notices that she _can_ actually feel his breath. They're so close and yet he's a kid and she just wants a memory—so she does recoil but only so far, shaking her head and feeling her loose hair move against her back, faintly. “Come on,” he coaxes.

She closes her eyes. Enough.

Enough, she decides. She's someone else now.

Abruptly she stands to her feet, pushing the very nearly empty (empty when it started and only slightly more empty now) aside to indicate that she's finished.

He stares at her and she can swear for a moment that she thinks he's going to flinch. Another drop in the bucket of her guilt. Partners aren't supposed to flinch away from their partners—well, unless, but she reminds herself that she's someone else.

“Can we... go somewhere?” she asks, discreet as he had been.

Bart widens his eyes. Then he looks down and picks at food he doesn't want. He eats—eagerly, quite often, and a lot—but it's nothing like what Wally had to do. There'd been energy bars in his bedside table drawer because—but no, stop. Not there anymore.

“Flattered as I am—“ he starts, mid-gulp.

She rolls her eyes, rounds the table and takes hold of him by his arm, rather carefully hauling him to his feet.

“... To talk,” she corrects him, running her hands down along the outer side of each arm to aright him rather than simply dragging him off.

“Oh.” He stares at her for a long, long time for a speedster. Sometimes he's looking right after and sometimes he's just processing at lightspeed. “... Ohhh. Partner-stuff,” he suggests.

“Yeah. … Partner-stuff,” she echoes. And then she's folding her arms over her chest but turns to lead the way. She doesn't lower her arms down as she walks and takes him to a quiet room where there are storage lockers, and she remembers that they're much smaller than the locker rooms in the Cave. Only the Cave isn't there anymore. And neither is she.

When they're alone, sealed off by the single, simple door, she relaxes enough to put her hands down to her sides. Then she's left standing there, ever so slightly taller than Bart and confused, her brow knitted a little tight.

“You wanted to see me,” Bart says, coyly as if they hadn't just come here together a moment before.

“Yeah, I—“ she tries to play ball, it's not happening. “Say something,” she orders.

He gapes at her and she can see the horror that's running along at least one track in his head. She'd reassure him she's no Mrs. Robinson, but referencing movies to Bart is always a mistake. Either he is embarrassed that he hasn't seen it and withdraws, desperately _wants_ to see it and will not rest until he has, _or_ he has seen it and is so proud he has he cannot stop. Actually _cannot_. That, and she's never seen The Graduate anyway.

“Anything,” she adds.

 _Say Anything._ Another movie she's heard about but never seen. She doesn't really watch TV anymore.

“... Anything,” Bart provides, and it's somewhere between wry and serious and _there_ it is. She sees it.

And she breathes it in. She stares at him until there's a little fuzz at the corners of her vision, and she knows she has to stop. She's not _there_ anymore.

Two quick steps bring her in and close the space between them. And she's taller, and in bridging the gap she sees them—both of them—their difference and their _sameness_ that won't ever go away.

He's shorter than her by a little bit, and that makes it easier to breathe. She holds him close to her, first gripping his shoulders and then relaxing her hands to wrap her arms around him more naturally. And she wants to ask permission to do this—to do it anytime she needs, he needs, they need, because she thinks sometimes he needs it. She should ask sometime, _what he lost_ , but she can't yet. And so she can't ask, and any justification she would have—well, his best friend ran off and people _forgot_ that she didn't know, and she's not _there_ anymore. She's not _theirs_ anymore. Not his. Not theirs. But Bart smells like him and the Garricks' shampoo. She remembers. Thanksgiving and a disastrous experiment with some bread stuffing. That shampoo, onions, garlic, sage. She remembers it being everywhere. Laughing.

She wonders why that's the memory her mind picks just as much as it knows why it's the perfect one. She squeezes a little tighter, keeping Bart in mind as she feels him breathe.

Then she's got the nerve and while it's hot and coiled—string drawn back, but she's not _there_ anymore, only right now she is, whether she ever will be again or not—she lets it go. Her lips press to his skin, just exactly and barely clear of his more-brown-than-auburn hair in the gap where he's pushed the length out of his face. They stay there, frozen in time for a moment and for half a second almost bruising, and then they move just a little—enough to make the requisite sound—and then she pulls away, almost propelling herself backward and away from him, only to find that hesitant, gentle but not _weak_ arms have moved around her waist, too. Her skin had been too hot, too restless, and she hadn't been able to feel it.

Her hands come down to gently take his arms, just beneath the elbows and carefully draw them away, to tell him that it's alright, that he can stop.

“... Are you okay?” she asks.

“Yeah,” he assures her with a nod so eager she knows it's genuine. Then she doesn't know what's gotten into her because there her lips are again, pecking another, much more instantaneous kiss to his forehead. And finally she's coaxed his arms free and he lets her go and he blinks at her, clearing the strain away from his eyes where he'd been concentrating, squinting his eyes shut. And she really should ask, but she can't right now because her throat is tight and aching, but she can't cry anymore. Instead she nods, answer received.

“You... remind me of him,” she explains. And that's it. That's enough.

Next time, she'll ask, but for now she backs up and turns around, and just for a little while she leaves because she can't _be there_ anymore.


End file.
